From Bhopalpatnam To Boter

ONE OF THE EARLIEST REPORTS OF Maoists entering the southernmost tip of Madhya Pradesh can be found on the pages of Dandakaranya Samachar, a paper published from Jagdalpur. In a report published on September 7, 1980, the paper noted the arrest of Maoists in Tarlaguda, a remote village near the banks of the Godavari on the border with Andhra Pradesh. It also noted the presence of five “suspicious” men in the Pujari Kanker area of the district. They could not be apprehended. Even the arrests in Tarlaguda were a matter of chance: the Maoists had stopped at a tea shop when they were challenged by the police. As the years went by, such luck was to become scarce and the hunters became the hunted. The report, citing police officers, concluded that “the police had alerted its patrol squad and was in constant touch with the police in Andhra Pradesh as well so that any situation could be handled.”

That was bravado, as anyone familiar with government rhetoric of the 1980s knows: we have things under control. In that part of the country, matters were already out of hand.

The Maoists were gaining large swathes of territory.

The date of the report is noteworthy. Just five months earlier, on April 20, the People’s War Group (PWG) had been formed by Kondapalli Seetharamaiah. The PWG, one of the many breakaway factions of the “revolutionary left”, aimed to usher in a communist revolution in Andhra Pradesh and over time in India. Seetharamaiah lost no time and within months dis­patched seven dalams or squads to Dandakaranya, as South Bastar is known locally. Taking inspiration from Mao Zedong and his ideas about revolution, this was to be “India’s Yan’an”, a “rear area” located away from the site of “revolutionary activity”—Andhra Pradesh.

At that time the original Bastar district had an area of 39,112 square kilometres, making it one of the largest districts of In­dia. It was large but also remote and inaccessible. Governing the district from Bhopal, the capital of undivided Madhya Pradesh, located 950km away, was more a matter of chance. There was a single, decrepit road that connected the length of the area, all the way to Bhopal.

For the next 40-45 years, the insurgents were to have a free run of the place. It was the longest span of time—since the Naxalbari incident back in 1967—that Maoists would remained unchecked. It was in this huge area that they established their dominion until they began losing control in the second decade of the 21st century.

Over the years, a mythology was propagated about the ori­gins and longevity of the Maoist ‘movement’ in this area. But, as is the case with all mythology, contact with reality is dam­aging. The core of the myth is that Maoism in India originated and thrived because of an “unjust state” and its agents inflicting violence on innocent Adivasis. The end of the Maoists’ domi­nance, if not their decimation, is explained by “extraordinary repression” of the “Indian state”.

Shouldn’t repression have led to resistance, in a ‘revolution­ary spiral’ all the way until the overthrow of the state?

The reality is different. To be sure, when Seetharamaiah’s men entered Dandakaranya, petty officials from revenue, forest and police departments did torment poor Adivasis. But in less than a decade, Maoists had made short work of these people. So much so that revenue and forest officials did not dare enter any village in this vast tract of land.

Then there is the claim that Maoists gave justice to the Adi­vasis: they ensured that tendu leaf contractors and those buying minor forest produce—leaves, fruits, herbs and spices—could not exploit the Adivasis who collected this produce and later sold it to these contractors. This claim ought to be taken with a bag load of salt. Over time, these contractors began paying protection money to Maoists. These and other extortions, such as those from road-building and mineral mining contractors, fuelled Maoist operations in Bastar.

Over time, Maoist strategy gradually became incoherent to the point that what they did in Bastar became a mere “holding opera­tion”. Three factors were at play in the loss of strategic coherence.

First, the area where the idea of a proletarian revolution held any meaning was in Andhra Pradesh. If one goes by Marx­ist ideas, this was the location where there was class conflict between landlords and ordinary farmers. In the period between 1995 and 2004, when N Chandrababu Naidu was the chief min­ister of Andhra, the worst features of this conflict disappeared, at least to a threshold where it ceased to matter.

Among leftist intellectuals poverty is often held to be the rea­son that propels people towards rebellion. This is a doubtful claim; even if one concedes that poverty indeed is a reason why people rebel in India, statistics from Andhra tell a different story. In 1987- 88, rural Andhra Pradesh had a poverty ratio of 21 per cent. This declined to 15.9 per cent in 1993-94 and to 10.5 per cent in 1999- 2000. After October 2003, when Maoists attacked Naidu while he was on his way to Tirumala, a crackdown was launched against them. By the time Naidu’s successor, YS Rajasekhara Reddy died in a helicopter crash in September 2009, Maoism had disappeared from Andhra and was restricted to a handful of districts in Telan­gana adjoining Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh.

This alarming situation in their front area should have alerted Maoists to change their strategy. Instead, they decided to intensify violence and efforts to control their rear area in Bastar. They could survive there for another 15 years. But it was a lost cause. Revolutionary activities based on class conflict were im­possible in an Adivasi society where there were no class distinc­tions, let alone class conflict. It was by gun, fear and the absence of infrastructure that they could survive there. That came to an end when very large and concentrated doses of money were injected into Chhattisgarh and other states under the Road Re­quirement Plan I, the Road Connectivity Project for Left Wing Extremism Affected Areas, and other schemes that were specifi­cally tailored to create road infrastructure in districts affected by Maoist violence.

The area under Maoist control shrank with a lag. By 2020, security forces began to penetrate areas once considered almost impossible to access. By 2024, the government had established a permanent presence—for the first time since Independence— in remote nooks of Sukma and Bijapur districts. Places like Pu­warti, Rekhapalli, Tekulagudiam, Pujari Kanker, and dozens of villages that had government presence only in Census, statistical reports and official documents, were finally under control.

THE SECOND MISTAKE that cost Maoists dearly was their excessive reliance on violence to maintain control in the rear area. Ideally, once control was established by the mid-1990s, political mobilisation should have replaced armed control. But this was never attempted or even appreciated. Vio­lence became “politics by other means”. Unlike the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPI(ML), in Bihar that abjured violence, gave up weapons and joined the political mainstream, the CPI(Maoist) did not even consider that path as an option. Whenever it chose to engage in talks with the government, the idea was to buy breathing space to regroup. Finally, the govern­ment took away that option in 2025—the only way peace talks could start was by giving up weapons. Till his death near the re­mote village of Boter in Narayanpur district, the general secretary of CPI(Maoist), Nambala Keshava Rao, was loath to do so.

The third mistake involved compromises necessitated by the need to garner resources like money. Maoists could never suc­cessfully manage a problem that confronts all insurgent groups: Where will the resources to run operations come from? The standard answer is some form of taxation in areas controlled by the insurgents. In Chhattisgarh this meant taking a cut as protection tax from contractors who buy forest produce from Adivasis and collect tendu leaves under government contract. This was the same set of people considered exploiters of Adivasis and with whom Maoists had arrived at a compromise of sorts, all to secure financial resources.

Ultimately, this proved fatal. More money could be extracted from road-building and mining contractors but at a great cost. These local contractors were instrumental in laying a network of roads in the interiors of Bijapur, Sukma and, to a lesser extent, Narayanpur districts. Maoists gained money but lost territorial control. As a rule of thumb, wherever a road is built, Maoists have to retreat by at least five kilometres from each side of it. By the middle of this year, they had run out of space. The successful control and ring-fencing of the Karregutta Hills, the very area where the first dalams had arrived in 1980, was a major blow. It is one of the inflexion points in the fight against Maoism.

WHILE THE MAOIST movement is close to an end, the impasse over what led to its emergence contin­ues. This is complicated terrain where analysis, activ­ism and, more ominously, providing cover to Maoists all come together in a messy way. Field officers, from security forces and civil administration alike, have a very different perspective from so-called analysts sitting in New Delhi.

One example of this mismatch between ground realities and the imagined causes of Maoism was the famous (infamous?) re­port of an expert group, released in April 2008. The report titled ‘Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas: Report of an Expert Group to Planning Commission’, involved 17 experts. Two of them were outright Maoist sympathisers and only two members had any experience in handling security related prob­lems in districts hit by Maoism. The remaining 12 members were leftists of one variety or another. It is not surprising that the tilt of the report was against any kind of government assertion. The theory that poverty leads to a swelling of Maoist ranks and the futility of the state trying to assert control was written large on the 95-page document. Sample this: “It is critical for the Government to recognize that dissent or expression of dissatisfaction is a posi­tive feature of democracy, that unrest is often the only thing that actually puts pressure on the government to make things work and for the government to live up to its own promises… Greater scope and space for democratic activity will bring down the scale of unrest, as it would create confidence in governance and open channels for expression of popular discontent.”

These lines are telling. Violence has been subsumed under “dissent or expression of dissatisfaction.” Then again, “Greater scope and space for democratic activity will bring down the scale of unrest” is nothing short of code for letting the Maoists continue as usual. This was the closest India came to danger—the very ex­perts meant to help the government out of a dead end were jus­tifying the violence that then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had described as the greatest internal security threat that India faced. Even more telling was the fact that the two real experts in the group, one of whom is a decorated police officer known for his humane approach in these matters and the other, who later served as National Security Advisor, had to publish their opinion in a different volume, one that was not published under the aegis of the Planning Commission. It is a miracle that India escaped the clutches of such ‘experts’ who came so close to justifying violence.

One table in the report, which compared “forward” and Maoist-affected districts, had an interesting elision. It tortured data to show how poverty and economic backwardness was re­sponsible for “extremism”. It had all the usual indicators: infant mortality rate, literacy rate, per capita food production, etc. But it did not adduce any data for one variable listed on the table: road length per 100 square kilometres in these districts. The most important variable, the one that ultimately was a major factor in beating back Maoists—connectivity—was not considered important by these experts. That sums up the politics of India’s intellectuals and analysts. The end of Maoism should be accom­panied by the disavowal of such shibboleths.

Andhra PradeshChhattisgarhIndian politicsinsurgencyMaoismTelangana